Smart, entertaining post-postmodernism, and with surfboards, too.
Clever debut novel of the Jersey Shore and more urbane environs by hip-hop journo and Yale Law grad Wolf.
This isn’t the Jersey Shore of those twerpy MTV reality-TV types, but it is modestly Situationist in the '60s sense—surreal, political, a little unhinged, as if Kafka had learned to surf. The narrator has been sloughing off in grad school, but not for any want of intelligence or any Less Than Zero–like need to Hoover up the neighborhood; this guy is smart, smart, smart, “studying metaphysics and teleologies, string theory and eschatology,” but just a little misdirected. What to do? Well, once the university yanks his funding, he heads back home, soon to be haunted by visions of a lovely young thing named Vera. (Connect her name to “truth,” philosophical reader, for the symbolism runs thick in this book.) Vera is also smart, and unworldly, too—perhaps too much so for New Jersey. What to do? Well, have a beer, maybe hit the waves, maybe talk crap with buds who stayed back home and didn’t head into the Big City to get their Baudrillard on. In the end, not much happens, though Wolf can write a nice sentence. The smart and entertaining conceit about his book, the thing that makes it memorable, is the typographic treatment that distinguishes levels of noise—whether from a city street or a crowded party—by its bursts of sans serif and slab serif and demibold obliques, all set in various directions and in various point sizes, making this a feast for the eyes that is oddly reminiscent at turns of the late-'60s Tom Wolfe but assuredly of the here and now—in fact, a literary analog of a kind to the sonic effects Wilco pulls off in Jeff Tweedy’s anthem to clanging urban chaos, “Via Chicago.” It’s something David Foster Wallace might have tried, and in the experiment, Wolf acquits himself well.
Smart, entertaining post-postmodernism, and with surfboards, too.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-86547-850-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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